OpenBSD/aviion

OpenBSD/aviion is an experimental port of OpenBSD to the Motorola 88100- and 88110-based AViiON systems manufactured by Data General.

The current port maintainer is Miod Vallat (miod@openbsd.org). Others are definitely welcome to contribute!

Table of contents

• History of the port
• Current status
• Project list
• Supported hardware

History:

In September 2003, Chris Tribo published some excerpts of the technical documentation for the AViiON series 400. Having a look at it, it was obvious these systems were built upon a modified MVME188 design, already supported by OpenBSD/mvme88k, but there was no interest in workin on AViiON support at that time.

Then, late April 2006, enough boredom convinced Miod Vallat to start a port, although he did not have access to any AViiON hardware, as a challenge. In two weeks, thanks to the help of Chris Tribo, a model 410 was running multiuser (but diskless) - a proof that this effort was worth continuing inside the OpenBSD tree. And work continues..

Current status:

All supported models (or with similar designs) should run multi-user but diskless, and currently limited to serial console. Also, on multiprocessor machines, the system will currently run on one processor only.

Projects (in no particular order):

• On-board SCSI support on series 400 and compatible models.
• Keyboard and video support.
• Test on as many different models as possible.
• Multiprocessor (SMP) support.

Supported hardware:

Supported machines

• 100, 200, 300, 400, 3000, 4000 and 4300 series
  These are the machines initially targetted by this port. Their design is close to the well-known MVME188 design, with different on-board devices; at the moment only the on-board serial ports and ethernet are supported.
  The only model tested so far is a model 410, but all the models in this series should work.

Untested machines

• 500, 5000 and 6000 series
  These use a slightly different design and might work, but they are completely untested.

Unsupported machines

• 88110-based models (550, 4500, 5500, 8500 and 9500 series)
  These systems won't likely be supported until the MVME197 works in mvme88k land. Moreover, these will necessarily use a different hardware design for which there is no documentation available at the moment.